Engage Health Systems Reviews 3

I only wanted to ask about an item missing (for a long time) from my prescription delivery service, I tried the pharmacy but was told to contact the surgery who suggested I use engage consult i failed. Well done engage consult (sarcastic)

Virtually unusable for most, my wife and I are reasonably adept online but, we cannot use this as it sends us round in circles. It seems that GP's now just lock themselves away and count their money as they are not seeing any patients!

Engage Consult is one of the "solutions" offered by Engage Health. They claim on their website that Engage Consult, their system for GP surgeries, “is designed to boost patient access”. This has not been my experience. The use of Engage Consult has led to the surgery I use no longer making known to patients an email address. The withdrawal of email addresses by GPs is a nationwide issue, see for example a discussion on MumsNet.

To communicate digitally with many surgeries now requires registering with Engage Consult (or a similar set up) and logging on each time. Even then, your message may not reach the surgery. For example, when I recently used Engage Consult to advise my surgery, which operate in two building some miles apart, that they had booked me for a flu’ jab at the practice further from me, I got a message from an “e-hub” worker telling me to ring the surgery. The worker did not bother to ask if I had hearing loss. (I do, but not to the extent I can’t use the phone. )

Not only that, the initial response from Engage Consult came by email, but not the substantive reply. To access that, I had to log on and click through options. This meant none of the immediacy of the email contact I formerly had with the surgery.

Engage Consult offers greater data security but that is not always a major concern of a patient.
And what of people who can use email but find the business of registering an account or logging on either off-putting or beyond their computer skills? The Patients’ Association has done research that found this is an issue for a sizeable minority, a minority who are likely to have more medical needs.

My memory isn’t what it used to be. One way I compensate for this is by carefully filing emails. This makes is easy to search for relevant messages to jog my memory. But I can’t do this so easily with Engage Consult. There is no search facility for patients.